Battling Big Australians

November 15, 2008 — 11.00am

Kathy Ridge was a university science student when she first visited the ancient sand dunes of Stockton Bight, north of Newcastle. While surveying the sandy slopes during a field trip, she found a beautiful hand-carved tool and sneaked it into her backpack.

"It was light green chert and I'd never seen a rock like it," says Ridge, a highly respected environmental lawyer. "I knew I was doing the wrong thing, but it had been worked on three of its faces and it sat so beautifully in my hand. I took it home and put it with all my nice shells."

The tool sat on Ridge's mantelpiece for seven years before the wheels of fate took her - and it - back to Stockton Bight. By then, she was a fully fledged environmental lobbyist - chief executive of the conservation group Surfrider Foundation and working alongside Carol Ridgeway-Bisset, an elder of the indigenous people from the Great Lakes area, the Worimi, to stop BHP mining on the northern stretch of the beach.

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The campaign was successful and the beach was turned over to Aboriginal ownership, protecting its ancient burial grounds and middens. But in protesting BHP's proposed cultural vandalism, Ridge also had to acknowledge her own. She took the tool and gave it back.

"It allowed me to have a conversation with Carol that I wouldn't have had otherwise," she says. "To say: 'I took this and I recognise that it's yours.' She said: 'Give it to me, I'll put it back.' She was very patient with me."

It is tempting to consider this vignette as the passkey to Ridge's tireless work for the environment. But it is a genuine passion for people and their environment that drives both her public and private lives.

In her time, the 38-year-old has been the director of Surfrider as well as OceanWatch and the Nature Conservation Council, an umbrella organisation of 120 eco-groups across the state. In her spare time she has sat on such heavyweight boards as the Environmental Defender's Office and the State Water Corporation. And she has fought on some of the state's most significant environmental battlegrounds - Stockton Bight, Sandon Point near Wollongong, and now the controversial $21 million redevelopment of North Head by the Australian Federal Police.

Ridge is a quiet achiever. When first approached for this interview she was dismayed at being the subject of a profile. She didn't want to be seen as "another over-concerned whitie". For days afterwards, she sent me emails with the names and phone numbers of more worthy candidates - senior Aboriginal elders and high-profile Sydney lawyers among them. It's typical of Ridge. Not only is she humble, she's an excellent networker.

"She's good at getting to the right person to find out the right information at the right time," says a former boss, the NSW Greens MP Ian Cohen. "She goes beyond what would be quite adequate because she believes passionately in what she is doing. She's got the research skills and the intelligence network. That's what makes her such as invaluable part of the environment movement."

Ridge came to the environmental movement a small but perfectly formed greenie. She had witnessed the environmental disaster of the Ok Tedi gold mine in Papua New Guinea as a 14-year-old living there with her family.

"We were part of the first group of white people to live on the site," she says. "Planes were flying in and out and people were still walking out of the bush. The environment shock was horrific but the social shock was tremendous. When we first went there everyone had beautiful shiny white teeth and healthy skin, but the sugar and the grog and the betel nut changed all that. I was going to boarding school in Sydney and flying back every three months, so the change was really noticeable."

In New Guinea, Ridge's father, a computer scientist, shared his love of nature with his family. They spent weekends bushwalking and diving off reefs.

Ridge's first love was the ocean, so at university she turned her attention to water conservation. Her first job was with Sydney Water. It was 1992 and she was the only female environmental scientist on the floor. After a little win - proving that Curl Curl lagoon had higher sewage levels than India's Ganges River - she got the activist bug and joined the fledgling Streamwatch program. She might have remained a scientist greenie forever if it were not for the Stockton Bight case.

It was late one night in 1996, sitting on Cohen's balcony, when she decided to turn her life around. Ridge remembers being exhausted and drained, the result of going head-to-head with a team of BHP lawyers. Some people might have vowed never to enter a courtroom again. Not Ridge. She took a policy job in Cohen's office and enrolled in a law degree.

"I was just the bunny standing up in court," she laughs. "That's why I went and got a law degree - because it was such a terrible experience."

These days Ridge has the language and experience to match the best lawyers that money can buy. The people she represents do not. And that's her motivation. Her clients are Aboriginal elders or land councils fighting to retain their cultural heritage in a state that is "open for business". She has a personal rule that she will take only one pro bono client at a time. At the moment she has two. It's symptomatic of Ridge's commitment, but also of NSW planning laws.

Ridge is unabashed in her criticism of the laws. She is not alone. Last month protesters rallied in Sydney's Hyde Park to call for changes to the controversial Part 3A of the Environmental Planning Act, which gives the minister power to override heritage or threatened species laws on "major projects". It was intended for essential infrastructure but has been used to rubber-stamp all manner of controversial developments - from coalmines to housing estates on sacred sites.

"The message is that if it's a major development it will get through, no matter what the endangered species or cultural heritage issues or other barriers are," says Ridge.

The barrier to the $21 million redevelopment of North Head is a colony of little penguins. The Australian Institute of Police Management wants to build 20 luxury villas within 10 metres of the penguins' breeding ground. The penguins are an endangered species and the last colony on the NSW mainland. The "copper cabana", as Ridge calls it, could threaten one in three breeding pairs.

"If there is one development in NSW that should be knocked back on threatened species grounds, this is it," she says. "Light and noise are disturbances and they are actually offences under the regulations, so it will be a good test of whether the impact upon threatened species can be assessed properly under Part 3A."

Then there's Aboriginal significance. This is a site of important rituals, and the headland is home to artworks on the cliffs near Collins Beach. Yet not one Aboriginal person was consulted about the development. These toothless cultural heritage guidelines are Ridge's campaign of choice.

The problem, she says, is that only native title owners and land councils need be consulted. Anyone else must read an ad in the local paper and respond within 14 days. But with less than 10 per cent of Aborigines members of land councils and even fewer holding native title, she wants a register of knowledge-holders established so people can be notified automatically.

"Bags and bags of tools are being destroyed," Ridge says. "Or it could be scar trees [from which large parts of bark were removed to make a canoe] or bora rings [ceremonial sites]. It's a tiny mundane act of dispossession that's happening every day. The department has a duty-of-care role to protect Aboriginal heritage and they are not consulting with the very people who hold the key."

It's not just high-profile developments on Ridge's radar. In small-scale construction across the state, artefacts and places of spiritual significance are destroyed. Only two prosecutions have been launched in recent years because defendant-developers must have "knowingly" destroyed an Aboriginal object. And bipartisan amendments in 2001 to remove the word "knowingly" have not been given royal assent.

"The Premier was lobbied by mining and agriculture groups not to pass the amendments on to the Governor because they hadn't been adequately consulted. It's highly unusual and highly controversial. No minister has fixed it and it's received no media coverage."

If prosecutions succeed, the maximum fine is $5500. Recently, a couple who knowingly destroyed a midden containing human teeth on their North Coast property, was fined $1600. "People think that Aboriginal people were wiped out 200 years ago and it was all terrible but it has nothing to do with them now."

But Ridge says Aboriginal artefacts are ubiquitous. "These people lived and occupied everywhere. But it's left to individuals with limited resources like Carol Ridgeway-Bisset or Allan Carriage [an elder of the Wadi Wadi nation] at Sandon Point to run court cases to protect their own cultural heritage and try to get the government to do what they should have done anyway."